Klein and Newell refer to interdisciplinarity as a process, but in a more general way:

A process of answering a question, solving a problem, or addressing a topic that is too broad or complex to be dealt with adequately by a single discipline or profession… [It] draws on disciplinary perspectives and integrates their insights through construction of a more comprehensive perspective.

Last weekend, we co-organized a hackathon in Munich, the WEARABLE DATA HACK 2015,  as the first hack day on wearable tech applications, data, and design. In this claim alone, lies some interdisciplinarity: one of our goals was to bring data and design experts together, in order to create something new, something neither data nerds nor design wizzes would be able to come up with if working in their respective domains, alone.

And how that idea worked out!

Everybody participating in this weekend was thrilled at the end: data scientists and hackers added their binary wisdom to the artistic and intuitive perspectives the designers came up with. Most hacker teams consisted of both, nerds and designers. And with just general guidance „cooperate, please“, the teams formed themselves, worked closely together for 48 hours, and respected each team member’s individual value-added. That’s my definition of interdisciplinarity.

I’m quite sure: nobody said the “i‑word” word during the weekend. And probably nobody has ever visited a workshop to learn to work in an interdisciplinary way — as it is offered in many corporate environments. The participants of the WEARABLE DATA HACK 2015 just did it: they cooperated and each of them added her best individual value to create new ideas and projects together.

Collaborate! Let’s Try More Interdisciplinarity!

A good summary of the team’s projects is provided by Anika Kehrer in her article for Make magazine (German only).
A very interesting and unique experience for me was the “Design Thinking“ session by Oliver Szasz who teaches design at Macromedia University, Munich. He asked us to analyze the process of gifting people and come up with new ways of gifting. That was an intensive experience with some quite innovative solutions to optimize gifting in different living situations. The greatest aspect here, again: the session was mostly visited by hackers and nerds who, typically, don’t focus on the aspects of gifting. But in that interdisciplinary environment it worked pretty well — and brought some great results.

My conclusion: just bring together some cool, curious people from different fields of expertise, provide them with a common goal, general guidance, and let them work. Together, they can tackle complex challenges. Cooperate and collaborate! Let’s try more interdisciplinarity. And it’s so much fun, even if the word itself sucks.

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We find the same behavior in other areas, such as business: imagine you work in the marketing department and you’ve just come up with some campaign ideas. Expect to receive well-intentioned feedback from everybody, even from colleagues working in not-so-marketing-related areas such as book-keeping.

People form their views on basically anything they see, hear and smell. They do it immediately after they have become aware of a new event or a sensory impression. There is a mental side of this reaction — the thought — and a physical side: the emotion. If you watch yourself narrowly you’ll notice a certain absoluteness of this process: when you see somebody, that seems to result in a thought and an emotion, quite automatically.

Learning

And yet, from all what we know about how our brain works, this obligatory process isn’t what it looks like. Without digging deeper into neuroscience here, we know that the grade of automatism of forming your view of something or somebody, is being developed with your growing wealth of experience — or — the increasing inability to asses everything anew, as if you haven’t seen it before. Watching babies in their very first months of existence, looking at all the new things around them, trying to grasp what’s going on, is a good indicator: without being burdened with any experience, knowledge, rules, etc., they welcome new things and new people free of prejudice.

Habits

And now to ourselves: why do we judge anything in the very first moment we experience it, if we don’t have to? The answer is simple: we have got used to it. To label, interpret and to assess everything has become so natural that we we don’t realize that we would not have to do it. We even think that these judgements are some unconditional biochemical processes.
Babies are approached with openness and love (at least as long as they don’t cry). Why is that? First, babies arouse protective instincts in adults. And second, babies themselves approach any adult in a completely unbiased way. As an adult, you realize that you could befriend this little tyke if you wanted.

Judging

Not to judge, giving up assessments of things, situations and people, seems to be one of the most critical factors of our personal wellbeing and the quality of our social interactions. For me, it’s quite tough not to give in and react immediately, but to wait, and perhaps not to react at all. It probably will stay a daily challenge. But compared to the small effort it takes,the effect of this technique is spectacular: every time I don’t judge, I get the feeling of having learnt something new. And — in most cases — my social interactions improve as a result. It’s like magic — everybody feels good or better, and nobody (except myself) knows why.

Don’t believe or mistrust me — I really recommend to give it a try: forego your assessments for just one single day. Then look at the effects. You’ll be pleasantly surprised.

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